But It Is The Journey That Matters In The End
by a-and-afan413
Summary: Post season 3 finale. Oliver and Felicity are on their road trip and learning more about each other. Lots of story telling, vacation stops, singing in a Porsche, and some smut. MY take on how their trip would go. Very little plot for now.


**AN: For the purpose of this story, I've chosen a real location for Starling City. The road trip map I've created starts in Redding, California. I've never been to California so please bare with me even if something is wrong. The sexy times will start probably in the next chapter**

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Felicity turned off her alarm before it even began beeping. Who needed an alarm when she had the excitement of starting a life with Oliver Queen to wake up to? She swung her feet over the edge of her bed and headed straight for the kitchen to start her coffee. Her Vera Bradley duffel bag sat by the foot of her bed half-packed. Oliver said he'd come by at 8:30 and help her finish up if she was unsure of some things, and she certainly was since she had no idea where they would be heading.

After she finished her first cup of coffee and had read through the news on her tablet, she headed to the bathroom in the hall to get ready for the day. She had just finished pulling her hair halfway up to keep the wind from whipping it in her face in the convertible when she heard a soft knock on her door. She unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door to find a smiling Oliver Queen.

"Woah, what's wrong with your face?" she asked him.

"Very funny," he replied, the small smile not leaving his face.

"Well I must be if you're smiling at me like that," she grinned up at him.

"You look great. Are you almost packed?"

"Yep. I just have to get my bathroom stuff together and you have to help me figure out whatever else I might need."

"You go work on the bathroom. I'll take care of the clothes," Oliver suggested, stealing a sip from her coffee mug and pulling a face at how sweet it was before he sauntered off to her bedroom. "Hey, which one is your underwear drawer? Oh, never mind, I found it."

Felicity let out a laugh, very intrigued by the direction this road trip was already taking. She filled up a makeup bag, packed hair ties and a curling iron, then put her shampoos and other shower products into a leak-proof bag. She was tossing her toothbrush and a couple pairs of contacts into her luggage when Oliver entered the bathroom with her duffel over his shoulder.

"Was there anything else you were planning on putting in here? I think there's something in here for anything we could want to do. And if you don't have it, we can buy it on the road."

"I was thinking about bringing my laptop," she replied and he gave her a look that said that this road trip was all about pleasure and not at all about business. "Not for work. Just in case we want to watch a movie or something at the hotel. There's no need to even go to a theater with my genius movie-finding hacker skills. Wait, are we even staying in hotels? Is this some sort of camping trip? Did you just have to switch out everything I packed? I'm sorry, I just assumed there would be hotels. Not that I mind either way." Eventually her babbling came to a natural end and she had that worried look on her face that she got when she talked too much.

Oliver stared at her for a second with what could only be dubbed his 'Felicity smile' before he replied "Yes, we will be staying in hotels. Every night. This is a vacation, and sleeping on the ground is more for survival than relaxation."

"Thank God. I know I said either was fine, but I much prefer hotels and beds," she let out a sigh of relief and Oliver smiled a real smile. He consented to the laptop with a condition that she couldn't use it for work and they loaded her two bags into the car.

Felicity double checked her townhouse and made sure she wasn't leaving anything behind that she would need on her trip. After grabbing a last-minute spare pair of glasses from her nightstand drawer, she set her alarm and locked up, saying goodbye to her home for the summer. Oliver gave her a sweet kiss on the cheek and walked to the passenger's side of the Porsche to hold open the door for her. He held her hand, like a gentleman, as she took her seat and he gently closed the door. He took his own seat behind the wheel and drove away, aiming to put Starling City in the rearview mirror.

"So, what direction are we heading? Canada, Mexico, or east coast? Where are we stopping tonight?" Felicity couldn't help the barrage of questions as they pulled onto the highway.

"I thought we'd start by driving down the coast. I thought it could be relaxing, but it'll take about four hours to get to the coast. Then we can just drive until we're ready to go to dinner and get a hotel. Probably somewhere around San Francisco, since we're going the long way."

"San Francisco is a three hour drive and you want to turn it into nine? Oh, I'm liking this trip already. When I was at MIT I used to go on long road trips to get to know the area since I wasn't from the east coast. It's always been one of my favorite things, but working in a corporate office by day and the Arrow Cave by night hasn't leant much time for it in the past few years," Felicity replied smiling. "Hey, you didn't flinch when I said 'Arrow Cave'," she laughed.

"You can call it whatever you want as long as you keep telling me more about yourself. I never really pegged you as a regular road-tripper, but you continue to surprise me," he flashed her a smile.

"Well, what do you want to know?" she asked.

"Everything. I think we've got plenty of time to talk, so I'd love to hear it all."

"Where to start? Hmm… I don't know. Ask me questions. I'm mysterious and complex; there must be things you've been dying to know about me," she quipped.

"As a matter of fact, there are. So… tell me, Miss Smoak, when did you realize that you were going to be a total tech genius?" he asked, and she smiled.

"Well, I don't remember tons about my dad, but I do know that he was a business man. We had a computer before almost anyone else that I knew and I was always playing with them and trying to understand them. I remember being almost nine years old, it's the late nineties, and I found this dinosaur of a computer in the attic and it just became my outlet after my dad left. I spent every night after school just figuring out this computer—making it faster and better. Eventually I just fell in love with what I was doing. I wasn't just doing it as a distraction from my life anymore; I was actually having fun. I thought that if something like that could make me that happy, I should pursue it. So, instead of sleepaway summer camps I went to tech camps and I skipped two grades and went to MIT."

"You are fascinating," he stated simply. "What was it like to skip two grades?"

"Hard. Not the workload; I really needed it. Fourth and seventh grade would have just been really unnecessary for me. But the making friends part was definitely a challenge. I was barely twelve years old when I started high school. I was exceptionally shy and I was a huge nerd. After lots of very infuriating tough love from my mother I agreed to join the A/V club, the physics club, and the academic decathlon team. I hated it at first because I felt awkward and out of place, but I eventually made friends and all the extra-curriculars helped me get into MIT." They spent the next hour just letting conversation roll freely between them.

"I'm really excited to see you just be yourself on this trip. I feel like I don't know near as much as I should about the person behind all the vigilantism." Felicity was very surprised that it wasn't herself, but Oliver who spoke those words. She gave him an incredulous look and erupted into a laugh that she couldn't have stopped from leaving her mouth if she had tried.

"You're telling me! I want to get to know you. Hell, I want _you_ to get to know you! With everything that's happened to you over the past eight years I'm sure it must feel crazy to have the whole summer ahead of you to just be a person again. I mean, I feel like I've been going crazy and being overworked. I can't even imagine how freeing this must be for you," she replied.

"It still doesn't quite feel real. I'm afraid that something will go wrong, but at least I won't be out looking for trouble. I'm going to try my best to just be normal. I meant what I said before. I want a life with you, Felicity. And a very long trip and a lot of time to get to know each other seems like the perfect way to start that life." Felicity knew exactly how he felt. She wondered how Oliver would react to a life without hunting for criminals every night, or plotting his escape from assassins. She found herself wondering what his idea of fun would be and if he even knew how to relax. "Tell me something about you that I would never guess by looking at you."

Felicity smiled sheepishly. She had the perfect shocking fact in mind but was terrified that since he had her mother's number he would ask for pictures. Something on her face must have betrayed her idea, and the fact that she didn't want to tell him because he was smiling and begging her to divulge her thoughts. "Well… I sort of went through a tiny bit of a goth phase in college…" she trailed off. His jaw dropped and he turned to look at her, briefly taking his eyes off the road.

"You were goth? Really?"

"Yup. The whole shebang. Black and purple hair, dark lipstick, I even had a pet snake for a while but I gave her away after Cooper 'died'," she used air quotes on the last word. "I was so weird. And it wasn't even that I was really happy like that. I think I was just trying to find some way to fit in since I was so young, and Cooper thought it was hot. After everything happened with him and he went to jail, I turned into this," she swept her hand from her head to her feet for emphasis. She was finally healing after she learned that she wasn't the cause of her ex-boyfriends death. Her past became much easier to manage once that weight was lifted off her shoulders. Oliver noticed that she seemed much more willing to talk about her past now than she ever had before and neither of them was sure if it was because they finally had time or because they had finally begun a healing process after many years of being forced to keep it all in. Felicity felt a great sense of freedom that stemmed from being able to speak freely about both Cooper and her father in the spanse of just a couple of hours.

"Well I think you look great like this. I couldn't imagine you with black and purple hair. It doesn't seem very 'you'. Even if purple is your favorite color," he replied.

"Yeah, but I'd much rather leave it for my lipstick, dresses, and my living room walls than for my hair," she laughed.

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They arrived in San Francisco around 8:30 that night and ate dinner before pulling into a Holiday Inn to rent a room for the night. Felicity was thankful that he wasn't looking for some perfect suite. She just wanted a room where she could curl up next to him for the night. She certainly didn't need 800 square feet in which to do that. They parked the Porsche and Oliver grabbed Felicity's two bags and his own and they walked in together.

"Hi, do you have any vacancies tonight?" he asked the front desk.

"Yes sir. One king bed or two fulls?" the woman asked, eyeing Felicity, seemingly answering her own question in her mind.

"One king," Oliver said confidently, looking Felicity in the eye. She felt butterflies in her stomach at his response. She was suddenly nervous. They had slept together in Nanda Parbat, and she had just been thinking about how she wanted to spend the night cuddled into him. There was really no need to be nervous, but she couldn't shake the feeling. He was all in on this now, she realized. It excited her that he wasn't pretending. He wasn't dangling this idea of them being together in her face, only to reel it away when the time came. This decision was the game changer of their relationship—taking it even further than just a road trip. In her mind, this was the moment when Oliver showed that he was fully committed to starting a real relationship with her

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 **AN: Thanks for reading! Reviews make my heart happy. Even if you tell me what I'm doing wrong. If anybody's interested I'd love to have some help with editing! Just message me!**


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